In 1971,
Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault faced off on Dutch television, or at least
that’s what their host, Fons Elders, kept prodding them to do. They were
discussing the idea of human nature, and though Elders knew they shared a left
libertarian politics, he assumed they would have philosophical disagreements,
that Chomsky would defend the idea of an essential human nature, rooted in
biology, and that Foucault would dismiss it as a mere social construction. Yet
the men kept agreeing with each other, until Chomsky said that violent
resistance to illegitimate power could only be defended ‘in terms of justice …
because the end that will be achieved is claimed as a just one.’ Foucault
responded: ‘If you like, I will be a little bit Nietzschean about this … it
seems to me that the idea of justice in itself is an idea which in effect has
been invented and put to work in different types of societies as an instrument
of a certain political and economic power or as a weapon against that power.’
And Chomsky replied: ‘Well, here I really disagree. I think there is some sort
of an absolute basis – if you press me too hard I’ll be in trouble, because I
can’t sketch it out – ultimately residing in fundamental human qualities, in
terms of which a “real” notion of justice is grounded.’

Letters

Jackson
Lears writes that, on the Chomskyan view, evidence for innateness is the ease
with which children ‘learn’ their first language, contrasted with the difficulty
adults face in ‘acquiring’ a second one (LRB, 4 May). He is perhaps using these terms interchangeably, but for Chomsky it
is children who ‘acquire’ their first language and adults who ‘learn’ a second.
In the Chomskyan worldview, language acquisition is rooted in biology whereas
language learning is not.

Jackson
Lears asserts that since the 1970s left-wing intellectuals have been drifting
away from Chomsky’s rationalist humanism towards a hermeneutics of suspicion (LRB, 4 May). Yet Foucault was politically engaged, especially with the prisoners’
movement, and although today’s Foucauldians may have retreated from the
barricades, Chomsky is still a towering figure of the left, unsilenced and
unsilenceable.

However, Lears doesn’t
mention the contradictions in Chomsky’s radical position, and seems to regard
Chomsky’s academic home, MIT, as if it were like any other powerful university.
It isn’t. MIT’s chief source of funding has long been the US military. Chomsky
sees his linguistics as parallel to pure physics, floating above and entirely
uninfluenced by the social; thus being funded by the military cannot influence
his science. But since the mid-1970s Everett Mendelsohn, based just across the
road in Harvard’s history of science department, has argued – he isn’t the only
one – that science and society are co-constructed. Each shapes the other.Chris Knight, in Decoding
Chomsky (2016), tells a story that bears on the happy marriage between
Chomsky’s research and the military’s need for a cognitive account of mind. MIT
was a prime target of the student movement against the Vietnam War. Chomsky,
who was opposed to the war, was caught between the students’ attack on military
research at MIT and his reliance on military funding. He was invited by a canny
MIT administration to join the committee it had established to discuss the
matter. While one activist student on the committee remained hostile to each
and every military research project on campus, another joined Chomsky in his
more selective criticism. Chomsky’s contribution helped take the steam out of
the student revolt.Hilary Rose
London WC1Vol. 39 No. 12 · 15 June 2017

Hilary
Rose’s letter concerning alleged ‘contradictions’ in my ‘radical positions’
relies on an account by Chris Knight that is rich in innuendo and
falsification, but lacking in evidence (Letters, 1 June). Knight’s crucial charge, which Rose repeats,
is that military funding influenced my scientific work. There is a very simple
way to verify the charge: determine whether (and if so how) the work changed
from the time I was a graduate student at Harvard with no military funding, to
my early years at MIT, when its funding was quite generally military, to
subsequent years when I received no military funding at all. Answer: not in the
slightest relevant way – which is doubtless why Knight evades this test.
Exactly the same is true of the other researchers in the same programme. End of
story. And an end to the slanderous charges against all of us.

Further, during the years
of military funding in the 1960s our group was at the centre of academic
resistance – not protest, resistance – to the war in Vietnam. My own
involvement in such activities was even more direct. Knight sidesteps
all this.Rose mentions one specific
example, a faculty-student committee on military labs of which I was a member.
Following Knight, she misrepresents the issues and the background. In fact the
issue of military funding of academic research never came up. As for the labs,
it was understood, of course, that whatever the commission determined, the
military work would continue. The only question was where. One position, which
prevailed, was to end ‘each and every military research project on campus’
(Rose’s approving words). The meaning was obvious: while formally separated
from the campus, the military labs would continue their work as before, also
effectively maintaining relations with academic programmes, though not visibly.
It’s quite true that I didn’t share this concern for the purity of campus,
which was a matter of no interest to the Vietnamese or any of the US military’s
other victims. Again, no contradiction.There is much more to say
about Knight’s quite astonishing performance and, more important, about the
idea that scientific work is necessarily influenced by its source of funding
(corporate, military, whatever). That claim, easily refuted, should not be
confused with the work of Everett Mendelsohn on science-society relations that
Rose adduces. But no need to pursue these matters here.Noam Chomsky
Cambridge, Massachusetts

Noam
Chomsky is damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t. From the centre and the
right he has been vilified for his alleged anti-Americanism, and from the left
for his supposed complicity with Pentagon-supported research at MIT. Hilary
Rose takes this latter tendency and runs with it, concluding that Chomsky’s
putative failure to condemn all military-funded projects at MIT ‘helped take
the steam out of the student revolt’. Chomsky is not above criticism, but this
is a bizarre claim. Surely there were other more compelling causes for the
weakening of anti-war protest: the infiltration of the student movement by FBI
agents provocateurs, the ending of the draft, the rise of identity politics.
Whatever the ambiguities of Chomsky’s actions at MIT during the Vietnam War, he
played a major role in legitimating the anti-war position among the American
intelligentsia at a moment when Cold War liberalism was still ascendant and
speaking out against militarist pieties required real courage.

There is also an
epistemological argument in Rose’s letter, which contrasts Chomsky’s faith in
pure science with the historicist view that ‘science and society are
co-constructed.’ As a historian I am committed to that constructivist
perspective, and there is nothing in my essay to suggest otherwise. What I
argued was that Chomsky’s philosophical position is idiosyncratic: he is a
rationalist and humanist who believes in the reality of such universal ideals
as truth and justice, while at the same insisting that certain problems may
remain forever resistant to questions posed by scientific research. From a
constructivist view, as I acknowledged, Chomsky’s universalist epistemology may
be naive, even fundamentally mistaken. But it may also provide a firmer
foundation for political action than a postmodern impulse to question absolutes
and universals. In this Chomsky resembles Orwell, whose slogan ‘good prose is
like a windowpane’ embodied a simple-minded view of language but also
underwrote a commitment to truth-telling in a time of lies.Jackson Lears
Ringoes, New JerseyVol. 39 No. 14 · 13 July 2017

Much as I
admire Noam Chomsky’s politics, I have to take him to task for trying to
dragoon sympathisers like myself into accepting his linguistics as ‘science’ (Letters, 15 June). I can’t accept that the biological capacity
underlying language didn’t gradually evolve, that it had no precursors but
instead sprang up, perfectly formed, via a single mutation, or that it wasn’t
designed for communication but remained inactive in speechless individuals for
millennia following its installation. These notions are so asocial, apolitical
and devoid of practical application that I can only assume Chomsky favoured
them to keep his conscience clear: he needed them to ensure that his militarily
funded linguistics couldn’t possibly have any military use.

That is the argument of my
book: not that Chomsky colluded with his military sponsors but that, given his
situation at MIT, he had to move mountains to avoid collusion. In his letter,
Chomsky claims that I sidestep his central role in resisting the US war effort
in Vietnam. In fact his courageous resistance to the US war machine is my
central theme. Had these not been his politics, he wouldn’t have needed to make
his work under military funding so utterly useless.Chomsky says that if my
argument were true, it would have been logical for him to have switched between
one approach to language and another as military funding waxed and waned. But
his entire intellectual milieu was shaped by military preoccupations, the dream
of accurate machine translation among them. Chomsky’s concept of language as a
stand-alone digital ‘device’ was a product of its time. No one expects an
academic who has committed his career to a particular paradigm to discard it
just because the funding stops.I accept that Einstein’s
theory of relativity would have been just as scientifically credible whether
funded by the church, the military or no one at all. But when something doesn’t
work as science, makes no sense, has no practical application and essentially
no connection with the rest of science? Then we have to seek a different
explanation for its prevalence.Chris Knight
London SE22

Noam
Chomsky may honestly believe that the source of his funding in the 1960s was
irrelevant but the funder may have had a different perspective. When a
government body funds research, it does so on the basis that it considers the
research relevant to the department’s brief. To the funder there is no
disinterested knowledge. In the decades following the Second World War, not all
military funding was directed at finding better ways of killing or maiming more
of the enemy’s population than your own; significant funds were directed at
information and control, seen as key in future forms of war. Research funded by
the military with these ends in mind ushered in artificial intelligence,
informatics, the web, GPS, smartphones and Siri, as well as Chomsky’s
revolution in linguistic theory.

The
distasteful correspondence that Chris Knight and Hilary Rose have carried
forward began with their very serious charges against the linguistics programme
at MIT, and against me in particular: namely, that we abandoned honest research
and scholarship and followed the demands of the military (Letters, 1 June). Though the charges did not merit attention,
I did respond, and suggested a simple test: show how our work changed in any
relevant respect from what preceded it (Letters, 15 June). There was no change. End of story. All that
remains is the need for apologies.

Knight now claims that work
I completed before there was any thought of military funding was undertaken ‘to
ensure that [my] militarily funded linguistics couldn’t possibly have any
military use’ (Letters, 13 July). He further claims that when I continued
exactly the same work at MIT, I ‘had to move mountains to avoid collusion’ with
the military. Evidently, he couldn’t know whether that claim was true or false.
In fact, there was no pressure at all, as is demonstrated by the record of
appointments and promotions during the period when the programme he maligns was
becoming the main academic centre for resistance (not protest) against the war
in Vietnam.Knight goes on to claim
that I have been trying to ‘dragoon’ him into accepting my linguistics as
‘science’. I couldn’t care less what he thinks about my work.Rose’s response is even
worse. She now reduces her charges to the claim that the Pentagon considered
‘the research relevant to [its] brief’. She doesn’t even attempt to justify the
claim. Doctrinal verities suffice. (Knight tries, at least: he says that my
work was inspired by ‘the dream of accurate machine translation’ – a topic I
have never had the slightest interest in, and to which my work has no
relevance.) Rose is effectively claiming that the Pentagon was greatly
interested in Turkish nominalisation (the first dissertation in our programme),
Australian aboriginal languages, Wilhelm von Humboldt’s inquiries into language
and the political order, and other work of comparable military relevance. And,
by the same logic, that it took a similar interest in the incipient programme
in philosophy and other teaching and research programmes sustained in the same
manner, including undergraduate courses in radical politics. As for her claim
that the military funded these endeavours along with ‘Chomsky’s revolution in
linguistic theory’ because they were ‘seen as key in future forms of war’ – I
will make no comment, out of politeness.Noam Chomsky
Cambridge, Massachusetts

"Chomsky is still a towering figure of the left, unsilenced and unsilenceable."

The notion of "unsilenced" and "unsilenceable" is senseful only in the deeper understanding of their context which is stained by very negative connotations. She displays her masked wish that Chomsky finally may be silenced and regrets and bemoans that he, unfortunately, seems unsilenceable. One hasn't to refer to Freud's Theory of the parricide to see immediately the deadly wishful longing and thinking of that person.

Chris Knight, as a British gentlemen, leaves it with assumptions and speculations, which highlight his scientific attitude:

"These notions are so asocial, apolitical and devoid of practical application that I can only assume Chomsky favoured them to keep his conscience clear: he needed them to ensure that his militarily funded linguistics couldn’t possibly have any military use."